Like many politicians and policymakers past and present, George W. Bush likes to make big claims, promises, and commitments. "Since I was [last] here," Bush recently told an audience in Chicago, "the regime of Saddam Hussein is no more" and "the world is peaceful and free….There are still terrorists networks which hate America," Bush claimed, "because of what we love. They hate us because we love our freedoms." (1).

"We're meeting the challenges to America," Bush told a Chicago audience last January. "We're strengthening our economy, and we're taking a battle to our enemies. And we're not going to leave our work half-finishedâ€¦ We'll press on to turn our recovery into lasting growth and opportunity that reaches every corner of Americaâ€¦We cannot be satisfied,â€ he elaborated, â€œuntil every part of our economy is healthy and vigorousâ€ (2). â€œAnd now,â€ Bush announced after signing his latest regressive tax bill last May, â€œwe have passed a bold package of tax relief for America's families and businesses which will help turn our recovery into a lasting expansion that reaches every single corner of Americaâ€ (3).

Bush likes to make strong-sounding statements of concern for the poor and people of color. â€œEven though progress has been made," Bush told a black church last January, "there's more to do. There are still people in our society who hurt. There's still prejudice holding people back…There's still a need for us to hear the words of Martin Luther King to make sure the hope of America extends its reach into every neighborhood across this land" (4).

Firing Into the Crowd: â€œWeâ€™re Just Sick of Them Killing Usâ€

Theyâ€™re still waiting for â€œpeace,â€ â€œfreedom,â€ â€œrecovery,â€ â€œhealth,â€ â€œvigor,â€ â€œhope,â€ â€œopportunity,â€ an end to â€œprejudice,â€ and a â€œlasting expansionâ€ in Benton Harbor, Michigan, a predominantly black (92.4 percent) â€œcorner of Americaâ€ 100 miles east of Chicago. Two weeks ago, Benton Harbor hosted the second significant racial disturbance to occur in the United States since the September 2001 terror attacks supposedly united all freedom-loving Americans in opposition to the nationâ€™s terrorist enemies (the first occurred in Cincinnati late in the same month as the jetliner attacks, in response to the acquittal of a policeman who killed an unarmed black youth [5]). For two nights following the death of popular local black motorcyclist Terrence Shurn in a police chase, hundreds of Benton Harbor residents roamed an eight-block area, some setting fires and attacking passers-by. As the New York Times reported in a front page story, â€œrioters were chanting, â€˜no justice, no peace,â€™ as they overturned vehicles, tossed small firebombs into houses, and shattered windows with bottles and rocks, injuring 12 People.â€ â€œThe rioting was so intense,â€ the Chicago Tribune reported, â€œthat fire trucks and squad cars were peppered by several shotgun blasts, and were pelted with bricks before they retreated. Benton Harbor police said they fired several shots into the crowd, but no one was struck.â€ (6).

By nightfall Wednesday, Benton Harbor was under military occupation. A large police force including hundreds of officers from the Michigan State Police and other local jurisdictions stormed the town in full riot gear, with armored vehicles, tactical units, assault rifles, and a helicopter with a sweep light that continually circled the riot zone. According to the Chicago Tribune, the scene â€œwas reminiscentâ€ of the 1960s, â€œwhen major cities such as Chicago saw some neighborhoods burn in a wave of urban Violenceâ€(7).

Reverend Jesse Jackson came to town. So did the Governor of Michigan, who expressed her belief that â€œthere needs to be reconciliation on both sides of the river.â€ â€œThat situation will be taken care of,â€ Berrien County Executive Brent Witonski reassured his community. â€œAnd that situation will not,â€ he added, â€œdefine what Benton Harbor is or what Berrien County is as we go forward.â€ â€œWe are going to do everything we can,â€ Benton Harbor police chief Samuel Harris told reporters, â€œto get this under controlâ€(8).

â€œWeâ€™re just tired, weâ€™re just sick of them killing us,â€ Benton Harbor resident Bonita Bulger, 28, told the Times. â€œOur backs are against the wall. The jobs are low. Our kids have nothing to do.â€ Evette Taylor, 31, told the Chicago Tribune that Benton Harbor residents â€œhave had enough. We have to take a stand. It [the violence] ainâ€™t right, but itâ€™s justified.â€ â€œTheyâ€™re not going to keep killing us,â€ Bulger told the Detroit Free Press. â€œWeâ€™re going to strike back. Itâ€™s a black-white issue. Itâ€™s a police issue. We canâ€™t go on living like this.â€ â€œThere just ainâ€™t no justice here,â€ Jimmie King, 31, a Benton Harbor native, told the Chicago Sun Times. â€œThere are a lot of people in this community who are upset with the way black folks are being treated. A lot of people have just given upâ€(9).

Just miles away, the waves of a great inland sea, Lake Michigan lapped up onto some of the finest swimming beaches in the world, adjacent to splendid cottages and resorts that cater to affluent vacationers who are happy to â€œgo forwardâ€ in life ignoring the tragedies of daily existence in poor black towns like Benton Harbor. On Chicago television screens and newspapers, pictures of the confrontation between the forces of order and angry mobs in occupied Benton Harbor were juxtaposed with similar images from occupied Iraq, suggesting dark connections between the war (on poor people) at home and the war (for empire) abroad.

Benton Harbor and The Color of De-industrialization

Nobody familiar with the racially disparate facts of life in and around Benton Harbor is exactly shocked whenever violence breaks out there. Incongruously surrounded by scenic lakefront properties and rolling rustic terrain, Benton Harbor was designated â€œthe worst place to live in the nationâ€ by Money Magazine in 1989 (10). That year, according to the US Census, 29 percent of Benton Harborâ€™s labor force was unemployed. Fifty-eight percent of the townâ€™s total population and 70 percent of its children experienced the freedom to be poor, living beneath the federal governmentâ€™s notoriously inadequate official poverty measure. The townâ€™s real unemployment rate â€“ counting discouraged job-seekers, people in prison, and involuntary part time workers â€“ was certainly more than 50 percent.

There was some improvement during the 1990s, as one would expect during the most â€œlasting [economic] expansionâ€ in America since the 1960s. Even so, by the end of the â€œClinton Boom,â€ more than half of Benton Harborâ€™s children and 40 percent of its families lived in official poverty. Median household income in Benton Harbor was $17, 471, less than two-thirds of the minimum basic family budget (the real cost of being poor, as meticulously calculated by The Economic Policy Institute) for one single parent and two children living there: $28, 422. Things have certainly gotten worse since the onset of the Bush administration, a period marked of economic recession and policy regression, in which the number of black children living in â€œdeep povertyâ€ (less than half the poverty level) in the United States rose from less than 700,000 to well over one million. According to one local minister, less than one in every three adult males in Benton Harbor is employed (11).

Truth is, Benton Harbor has been in dire straits for more than a generation. Prior to the Vietnam era, it was a thriving community, host to what journalist-author Alex Koltowitz calls â€œa flurry of manufacturing activity, most of it centered on the automobile â€“ foundries and parts plants primarily.â€ There were enough decent blue-collar jobs in and around Benton Harbor to attract a modest local black working-class, which accounted for a quarter of the townâ€™s population in 1960.

In the Sixties and Seventies, Benton Harbor lost its downtown department stores to a newly constructed mall outside town. Corporate globalization and domestic de- industrialization eliminated many of its foundries and part plants. â€œUrban renewalâ€ scattered its black population, previously concentrated in a low-lying area next to the St. Joseph River, which separates Benton Harbor from its â€œtwin city,â€ St. Joseph. â€œWhites, uneasy with their new neighbors, fled,â€ notes Koltowitz, â€œmany of them simply skipping over the river to St. Joseph. Institutions followed, including the newspaper, the YMCA, the hospital, even the local FBI offices. Each had its own reason, which at the time made sense, but in the end, after theyâ€™d drifted off, like geese going south, the reasons sounded more like excusesâ€ (12).

Itâ€™s a familiar story for those who study race, class, and industrial relations in post-WWII America: the burden of corporate disinvestmentâ€™s negative social consequences falling with racially disparate weight on blacks, who lack the same resources and freedom as whites to move up and out of communities and occupations rendered obsolete by the supposedly benevolent workings of the supposedly free market, sold to us as the solution to all problems social, political, and personal by the architects of American policy and opinion.

Things are different on â€œthe other side of the river,â€ a phrase that provides the title for Koltowitzâ€™s popular 1998 book on race in Benton Harbor and St. Joseph. In the latter town, which is 95 percent white, just 4 percent of the families lived in poverty in 1999, and the median family income was $ 51,328, double that of Benton Harbor (13).

Criminal Justice

Benton Harborâ€™s slide into economic oblivion and racial isolation has been accompanied and reinforced by troubled relations with predominantly white criminal justice authorities. As early as 1966, when local white police officers referred to adult black males in Benton Harbor as â€œboy,â€ â€œaggressive police tacticsâ€ caused black rioting there.

In the mid-1970s, an all-white jury convicted an African-American, Maurice Carter, for the shooting of an off-duty white police officer in a Benton Harbor store, even though the store clerk testified that another man was the assailant.

In a 1991 incident that provided the central story line in Koltowitzâ€™s book, Eric McGinnins, a black teenager, was drowned after venturing to date a white girl in St. Joseph â€“ a tragedy many in Benton Harbor consider a lynching and see as insufficiently investigated by the authorities.

In September of 2000, an 11-year-old Benton Harbor boy, Trent Patterson, was killed on a sidewalk by a police car conducting a high-speed chase through town â€“ collateral damage in the racially disparate War on Drugs that is being waged with special intensity in poor black communities across the United States.

Last April, a black Benton Harbor resident, Arthur Partee, died from â€œstrangulationâ€ while being arrested. And two Mondays ago, Terrence Shurn died when he lost control of his bike during another high-speed police chase through Benton Harbor. The officers pursuing him from neighboring Benton Township were both white (14).

How to Turn Candles Into Firebombs

In the simple-minded story provided by Chicago television news, the riot erupted as an immediate, Pavlovian response to Shurnâ€™s death. The reality is more complex. Despite the New York Timesâ€™ misleading page-one headline â€“ â€œFatal Police Chase Ignites a Rampage in Michigan Townâ€ (June 19th, 2003, A1) â€“ print media accounts suggest that the violence really emerged only after Benton Harbor police moved to disperse a peaceful crowd of candle-holding mourners, gathered for prayer at the site of Shurnâ€™s death. As Latonya Doss told the Detroit Free Press, tempers escalated when the police threatened to arrest a group of 50 people holding a prayer vigil. â€œWe werenâ€™t loud,â€ says Doss. â€œWe were singing church songsâ€ (15).

The Tribuneâ€™s main article on the events in Benton Harbor claimed that â€œthe rioting erupted in reactionâ€ to Shurnâ€™s death. Deeper in the article, however, the paper noted that that â€œlater Monday, a crowd of mourners gathered at the crash site, which was still being investigated. Additional police cars were summoned to the scene, mostly to disperse the crowds that had gathered with candles. Some prayed at the site and then became angry when authorities told them to go home. Thatâ€™s when the fires began, officials saidâ€ (16). Disperse, mourners! By interrupting this peaceful demonstration, police needlessly exacerbated a tense situation, turning candles of prayer into firebombs of rage.

At the same time, as Ashley Black, Shurnâ€™s cousin, told the Chicago Sun Times, â€œthis isnâ€™t just because of what happened Monday. This is because of everything that has been happening in Benton Harbor for yearsâ€¦you are talking about years of frustration.â€

Blackâ€™s perspective is seconded by Koltowitz, the leading outside authority on the â€œtwin cities.â€ Koltowitz told the Times that the riot â€œhad a lot more to it than one personâ€™s death. Benton Harbor, he noted, is â€œcompletely â€“ economically, spiritually, and geographically â€“ isolatedâ€¦Itâ€™s like two different Americas,â€ Koltowitz notes, of the contrast between Benton Harbor and St. Joseph (17).

â€œNo Community Can Thrive When People Are Riotingâ€

The prizes for worst commentary on the terrible events in Benton Harbor go to chief Harris and to Chicago Sun Times columnist Mary Mitchell. Harris claimed to find it â€œunbelievable to see all this in our community. It is so unnecessaryâ€¦No community,â€ he told reporters, â€œcan thrive when people are rioting and looting in the streets.â€ At the same time, Harris downplayed the significance of the violence, noting that Shurn remained the only fatality and that the rioting was carried out by only â€œone percent of the communityâ€ (18).

Mitchell chided the rioters for engaging in self-defeating behavior and misdirecting their anger. â€œSince racial frustration appears to have ignited the riot,â€ Mitchell found it â€œironicâ€ that Shurn was chased by police officers from Benton Township, which is 52 percent black, that Harris is black, and that the damage took place in predominantly black Benton Harbor. â€œItâ€™s as if,â€ Mitchell opined, â€œthe rioters learned nothing from the turbulent riots of the 60s that leveled whole blocks in black neighborhoods in L.A., Detroit, and Chicago. Some of the neighborhoods have never been redevelopedâ€(19).

Harrisâ€™s over-obvious statement on the negative consequences of rioting inverted cause and effect. He ignored the basic fact that Benton Harbor has been experiencing a long descent into socioeconomic Hell â€“ only slightly ameliorated by the 1990s expansion, repealed by the Bush recession, and deepened by the ubiquitous criminal records that Harris and his colleagues regularly place as lifelong marks on Benton Harbor residents, young males especially â€“ for more than three decades, without the benefit of a single riot. Moreover, the alienation and despair that create the essential breeding ground for violence in Benton Harbor are hardly limited to 1 percent of the townâ€™s population, as is suggested in the remarks of numerous Benton Harbor residents who did not engage in violence.

â€œRead Your Historyâ€

Mitchellâ€™s analysis was flawed by the bad assumption that the bitter young men who rampaged have meaningful access to the lessons of urban violence in the Sixties. Of course, the rioters were striking out in the blind rage of the moment and hardly trying to act upon some sort of rational calculus as to how to best bring about social progress.

It was simply silly for Mitchell to see contradiction in the facts that the white cops who chased Shurn happened to work for a township where blacks are barely a majority and that the riot took place in a predominantly black town with a black police chief. Mitchell seemed incapable of grasping the elementary fact that a black authority figure (in this case Harris) can serve a white-dominated power structure and behave in accordance with that power structureâ€™s authoritarian dictates. She was wrong to suggest that the Sixties riots still provide a significant excuse for the failure of investors to â€œredevelopâ€ neighborhoods â€“ something that commonly deepens the affordable housing crisis in inner city communities, it seems worth noting â€“ that werenâ€™t all that impressively developed when they hosted rampages more than 30 years ago. And she could hardly have meant to suggest that the rioters should have carried their anger across the river, putting the riot squads into firing mode.

Speaking of history, Mitchell forgot or needs to learn that black urban unrest was in fact a key factor in the winning of key civil rights gains, most notably affirmative action, in the 1960s. In a carefully researched monograph that Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer (no radical) calls â€œthe best informed and most sophisticated history and analysis of the origins of affirmative action,â€ University of Pennsylvania sociologist John David Skrentny (also no radical) shows that â€œthe 1960s urban riotsâ€¦ shook the foundation of the culture of equal employment opportunityâ€ in a way that made affirmative action â€œa safe, even legitimate policy optionâ€ in the US (20).

No, the Supreme Court decision upholding affirmative action at the University of Michigan one week after Shurnâ€™s death was not likely influenced by the Benton Harbor riots. It is certain, however, that policymakers, civil rights leaders, and the media would not be paying the slightest attention to Benton Harbor right now but for the decision of the townâ€™s residents to â€œstrike back.â€ As Benton Harbor minister Edward Pinckney put it, â€œI hate to see this happen, but sometimes you have to get you message across. Thereâ€™s never change without conflict. Read your historyâ€ (21).

It is unclear, finally, why Mitchell thought the burden of learning historyâ€™s lessons falls only on the poorly educated youth of Benton Harbor. A less authoritarian and victim-blaming approach would apply this admonition especially to local authorities. It would note that urban riots in the US since the Sixties have almost always been sparked by over-aggressive police tactics. Recent examples include the Los Angeles (Rodney King) uprising of 1991 and the 2001 (April and September) disturbances in Cincinnatiâ€™s â€œOver the Rhineâ€ neighborhood,

Regarding message, â€œno justice, no peace,â€ is a sophisticated slogan, chanted by more than a few highly educated global justice and antiwar protesters (myself included) in recent years. It expresses an idealistic determination to disrupt the standard operating procedures of business as usual unless and until the social contract is honored by the powers that be. â€œThe situationâ€ is not â€œtaken care of,â€ it insists, until fairness is established.

Two Americas

Those who cling to the image of America as Mr. Clean, an unsullied, freedom-loving, and hope-filled â€œbeacon to the world of the way life should beâ€ (to quote Texas Senator Fay Bailey Hutchinson [22]) are free to write off the Benton Harbor disturbances as a freakish, small-scale, and short-lived anomaly â€“ a throwback to the bad old days before the world became â€œpeaceful and freeâ€ and America became the worldâ€™s greatest multi-racial democracy.

The facts of race, class, and poverty in contemporary America suggest a different, darker narrative. More than three and a half decades after the historic victories of the black Civil Rights Movement, equality remains a highly elusive goal for African-Americans and black America lives almost like a Third World nation within the world systemâ€™s most prosperous and powerful state. In a society that possesses the highest poverty rate and the largest gaps between rich and poor in the industrialized world, blacks are considerably poorer than whites and other racial and ethnic groups, and economic inequality correlates closely with race, so that (23):

· African-Americans were twice as likely to be unemployed as whites.

· To attain equal employment in the United States between blacks and white, 700,000 more African-Americans would have had to be moved out of unemployment and nearly two million African-Americans would have to be promoted into higher paying positions.

· The poverty rate for blacks was more than twice the rate for whites.

· Nearly one out of every two blacks earned less than $25,000 but one in three whites made that little.

· Median black household income ($27,000) was less than two thirds of median white household income ($42,000).

· Black familiesâ€™ median household net worth was less than 10 percent that of whites. The average white household has a net worth of $84,000 but the average black household is worth only $7,500.

· Blacks were much less likely to own their own homes than whites. Nearly three-fourths of white families but less than half of black families owned their homes.

· Thanks to the white-black employment, income, home-ownership, and wealth gaps, few blacks can expect to receive the crucial financial support that whites commonly receive at critical moments in their lives as attending college, getting married, and purchasing a home. Black parents simply cannot offer the considerable bequests and inheritances to their children that are widespread in the white community.

Even more dramatic are related racial disparities in the criminal justice system. While blacks make up just 15 percent of illicit drug users, they account for 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses. They comprise 42 percent of those held in federal prison for drug charges and 62 percent of those in state prisons. Not surprisingly, white drug offenders are much less likely than their counterparts to serve time in prison. Blacks constituted more than 75 percent of the total drug prisoners in America in one third of all states (including Illinois), according to a report issued in 2000 by the prestigious human rights organization Human Rights Watch.

Especially shocking, blacks are 12.3 percent of US population, but comprise roughly half of the roughly 2 million Americans currently behind bars. Between 1980 and 2000, the number of black men in jail or prison grew fivefold (500 percent), to the point where, as the Justice Policy Institute (2002) recently reported, there were more black men behind bars than enrolled in colleges or universities in the US. On any given day, 30 percent of African-American males ages 20 to 29 are under correctional supervision â€“ either in jail or prison or on probation or parole. A young Black man age 16 in 1996 faced a 29 percent chance of spending time in prison during his life. The corresponding statistic for white men in the same age group was 4 percent. According to the best recent estimates, finally, one in five black men is saddled with a prison record and an astounding one in three black men now possesses a felony record (24).

These and other facts of racial inequality in America provide fertile soil for further racial violence in the supposed â€œbeacon to the world.â€ As they suggest, Benton Harbor is only one of many forgotten â€œcorners of America,â€ loaded with the raw materials and waiting for the spark to set the riot squads and helicopters of homeland security and class/race hierarchy in motion.

Killing Hope

Interestingly enough in light of the presidential remarks that opened this essay, the likelihood of such violence is richly encouraged by the White House policy agenda. Beneath superficial language of compassion, opportunity, and color-blindness, that agenda is dedicated to increasing the already dramatic mal-distribution of American wealth and power, deepening American class and racial inequality, and spreading the freedom to be poor in the worldâ€™s wealthiest nation. It blames the disproportionately black poor for their presence at the bottom of the steep US hierarchy and makes it ever more difficult for them to attain public assistance of any kind. It starves state governments and social programs to pay for massive, privilege-friendly tax cuts and feed a dramatic escalation of the military budget, itself a huge public subsidy to high-tech corporations. It legitimizes violence as the (supposed) solution to social and political problems and privileges authoritarian criminal and military justice over democratic social justice at home and abroad.

It seeks to shift society and government once and for all away from expanding the public good, protecting children, and providing for the welfare of any but the privileged few. Its notion of a noble, taxpayer-funded public work is to build a prison, to occupy a poor and harmless but oil-rich nation halfway across the world, to build yet another expensive, military base in yet another distant outpost of the planet. It spends billions on the futile, half-hearted, and crony-corporatist â€œreconstructionâ€ of a conquered nation devastated by US foreign policy while ignoring the needs of those at the growing desperate bottom of its imperial â€œhomeland.â€

It generates and thrives on a falsely created sense of permanent war and public emergency that treats dissent as treason and uses the war on terrorism as cover for efforts to advance authoritarianism, inequality, and empire at home and abroad. It strips the public sector yet further of its social and democratic functions, managing the growing number of desperately poor people with the iron fist of the stateâ€™s expanding repressive and police functions, themselves linked to private-corporate interests in the form of a burgeoning prison-industrial complex. It seeks to nullify the basic social contract in America, poisoning democracy, criminalizing and militarizing social problems at home and abroad (25).

Beneath shallow public relations spin about the need for â€œreconciliationâ€ (but not equalization or real power-sharing) between the two sides of the [American] river, its basic idea of â€œtaking careâ€ of a â€œsituationâ€ like Benton Harbor is to send in the helicopters and assault-rifle teams. It is all about killing hope for a just and democratic future in communities like Benton Harbor, and indeed among the majority of the populace.

In these and other ways, it is setting the stage for more and bigger Benton Harbors in months, and years to come. No justice, no peace.

Paul Street is an anti-racist urban social policy researcher in Chicago, Illinois and the author of numerous essays, including â€œFree to be Poor: the Devilâ€™s Gift at Millenniumâ€™s Turn,â€ Z Magazine (June 2001): 25-29.

5. David Walsh, "State of Emergency Declared After Acquittal of Cincinnati Cop Who Short Youth," World Socialist Web Site (September 28, 2001) at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/ sep2001/cinc-s28.shtml

10. Alex Koltowitz, The Other Side of the River: a Story of Two Towns, A Death, and America's Dilemma (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1998), pp. 4-5.

11. United States Census, SF-3, social and economic data, available online at http:factfinder.gov.us; Heather Boushey et al., Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families (Washington D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2001), Table A4-2, available online at www.epinet.org/books/hardships.pdf; Sam Dillon, "Report Finds Number of Black Children in Deep Poverty Rising," New York Times (April 30, 2003).

12. Koltowitz, The Other Side, p. 31.

13. These and other disturbing contrasts of class and race are readily available in tabular form to amateur sociologists on the useful â€œfact-finderâ€ web site of the US Census, cited above (see note 11). For useful visual images, see remarkable contrasts of race, income, and population density between the two towns, displayed in color-coded maps at www.ersys.com/usa/26/2607520/income.htm (and â€œdensity.htmâ€ and â€œethnic.htmâ€). On racially disparate consequences of de-industrialization, see, among many cites, Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of The Urban Poor (New York, NY: Vintage, 1997).

23. National Urban League, The State of Black America 2001 (New York, NY: National Urban League, 2002), pp. 15-17; Paul Street, The Color of Opportunity: Race, Class, and Labor Market Inequality in the Chicago Area (Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League, April 2003), available online at www.cul-chicago-org.

24. Paul Street, The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison. Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League, 2002), available online at www.cul-chicago-org; The Sentencing Project, "Facts About Prisons and Prisoners," at www.sentencingproject.org; Jan Chaiken, "Crunching Numbers: Crime and Incarceration at the End of the Millennium," National Institute of Justice Journal (January 2000); Naftali Bendavid, "One in 32 Adults in Criminal Justice System," Chicago Tribune, 27 August 2001; Prison Policy Initiative, "Incarceration is Not an Equal Opportunity Punishment" (2002) at www.prisonpoicy.org; Mother Jones and JPI, "Debt to Society;" Human Rights Watch, World Report 2002: United States ; Human Rights Watch, Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs (2000); Human Rights Watch, "Race and Incarceration in the United Statesâ€ (Washington DC: Human Rights Watch, February 27, 2002); Justice Policy Institute, Cell Blocks or Classrooms? The Funding of Higher Education and Corrections and Its Impact on African American Men (Washington DC, 2002); â€œThe Stigma That Never Fades,â€ The Economist, August 10, 2002; Devah Pager, â€œCriminal Careers: the Consequences of Incarceration for Occupational Attainment,â€ paper delivered at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association, 2001; Peter Kilborn, â€œFlood of Ex-Convicts Finds Job Market Tight,â€ New York Times, March 15, 2001; David Ladipo, â€œThe Rise of Americaâ€™s Prison-Industrial Complex,â€ New Left Review 7 (January-February 2001); Christopher Uggen, Jeff Manza, and Melissa Thompson, â€œCrime, Class, and Reintegration: The Scope and Distribution of Americaâ€™s Criminal Class,â€ paper delivered to the American Society of Criminology (2001).